Legal Technology Journal

Taking over last year’s IT Team of the Year, was a daunting task. Brodies’ new IT director highlights the challenges and triumphs of his first six months and outlines his plans for the future.

In August 2007 I moved my family lock, stock and barrel from London to Edinburgh. The reason? To take up the position of IT director at Brodies LLP, replacing Andrew Powell, who moved down to Nabarro in London. To answer the most common question I get asked, no, we didn’t swap houses or pass each other on the way.

However, when people ask what prompted such a big move away from London after nearly ten years of working in the City, they usually expect to hear that it was for the fantastic quality of life and atmosphere in Edinburgh, and it’s true that this has certainly been a great bonus. The true answer though, is that it was a fantastic opportunity to take up the IT reins at an ambitious and dynamic firm at an exciting time in its development, and the location of that firm just happened to be Edinburgh. It could have been a little daunting taking over the management of the Legal Technology Awards’ ‘IT Team of the Year’ (2007) from the Legal IT Forum ‘IT Director of the Year’ (2005), but what these awards demonstrate is that Brodies is a firm that has been punching above its weight in IT terms for some years. I was already aware of Brodies as a firm that was leading with technology, and also that it was a growing business, so there was no doubt in my mind it was an excellent move to make, and I have not been disappointed.

Moving from a larger international firm like Bird & Bird to a Scottish-based firm is, on the surface, quite a big change, and certainly from an IT perspective having all the firm’s offices on a single landmass does make things a little more straightforward. However, I was more struck by the similarities between the firms than the differences:

• both have been following a plan of ambitious controlled expansion while remaining highly profitable;
• both have been rising rapidly up the rankings; and
• both firms have been making innovative use of technology, making timely and canny investments in recent years.

Furthermore, in terms of culture, both are highly professional and hard-working but also friendly and inclusive places to work. Most important of all – to me at least – both firms have a strong and stable infrastructure base, and can therefore take advantage of transformative technologies that can be built on these solid foundations.

My own background is in development, systems design, and business analysis, and my focus at Bird & Bird was primarily on managing the applications side of IT. Obviously, at Brodies my remit is now everything IT-related – that has been a big change, but a really interesting learning curve – and I’m still learning. Coming from an applications rather than an infrastructure background means that I have a keen interest in the software in use and the development we are doing, but if the underlying infrastructure is not purring away contentedly, everything else suffers, so you have to look at the whole picture. From a firm management point of view, it is refreshing to be part of the strong management team at Brodies, where IT is valued and is part of the decision-making process at board level. Change management is always a problem for transformative IT, but when the firm has been evolving and adapting as successfully as Brodies has in recent years, change becomes ‘business as usual’; and with strong backing from the business, it can be controlled and managed effectively.

At the time of writing, I have been with Brodies for almost six months, and so it feels like a good point in time to take stock. As might be expected, my first few months were focused on getting to know people at Brodies, meeting the partners, attending departmental meetings to introduce myself and IT, and most importantly getting to know the IT team. You don’t win ‘IT Team of the Year’ without knowing what you’re doing, so as I had expected the team is made up of highly skilled and dedicated members who provide a reliable service to the firm. It would be fair to say that the Brodies IT team has achieved a lot with a little thus far, and the relatively small team has successfully completed large projects within tight timeframes – for example, as an early adopter of Interwoven’s WorkSite Document Management (DM) platform, and handling the major technology consolidation required when the firm acquired Bishops, a 100-user Glasgow-based firm in August 2006. In keeping with the firms’ strategy to continue to expand over the next few years, the IT team will need to be resourced appropriately, so part of my strategy for IT is to build a team structure that will scale well along with the firm, rather than simply adding more bodies as headcount increases.

Getting to know users

While looking at how we do things within IT and structuring the team correctly is essential, as an IT service we also have to be outward-looking and user-focused. As part of getting to know the users of the IT service, I have been making my way around the firm putting names to faces and letting people know what we are here for. However, rather than being a one-off PR exercise, it is essential to develop an ongoing dialogue. To that end, in addition to holding workshops and attending departmental meetings, I have set up a technology evaluation group, made up of a representative mix of staff.

The group meets periodically to review new products that we are either considering or have bought and need to decide how best to configure. Members are asked to give their views and represent their business area, point out any potential pitfalls and suggest new ways of working. This sort of two-way communication is key to understanding what users need and responding accordingly, and helps to judge the priorities of projects based on where the greatest need is. Feedback so far is that people really appreciate the chance to be involved in the evaluation process, and just to have a forum to talk about the things that are important to them.

In terms of projects for IT, in the short time I have been with Brodies, the team has:

• successfully completed the rollout of digital dictation to the firm;
• upgraded our DM back-end to take advantage of new features and fixes (twice!); and
• most importantly opened up a new auxiliary office in Edinburgh.

Due to growth and to make better use of space going forward, the firm has taken an additional Edinburgh annex office nearby. Though much of the planning had already been done before I arrived, there was still a huge amount of work required from the team to move 130 staff to the new office. Communication lines were installed, the server room fitted out, the building cabled and all the staff moved successfully with the minimum of disruption during November, and feedback from the departments has been excellent. As the first major challenge of my new role, it was a fantastic opportunity to see the team in action and performing so well. As is often the case with IT, the smooth and orderly rollout was the result of a lot of preparation and hard work behind the scenes that was mostly invisible to the users.

Communication is key

One of the key themes that has emerged from my interaction with the firm has been communication. No surprises there then – communication is central to what we do as law firms, and IT plays a significant part. Communication with clients is, as always, of primary importance, whether by e-mail, extranet, bulletin or telephone.

With increasing demands being made on lawyers to be available regardless of the time of day or where they happen to be, they need to be able to continue to provide a quality service to their clients while away from the office. However, with the firm growing from a single office to three offices within the space of 15 months, there are also challenges around ensuring that our staff continue to communicate openly and efficiently, regardless of location. So communication is something I have been devoting a lot of time to, analysing the mobile devices currently being used, working with the team to release a redesigned extranet to key clients, investigating CRM solutions to improve contact with clients, looking at better ways of enabling interoffice collaboration such as video-conferencing/desktop webcam conferencing and instant messaging, looking at ways to improve remote working, and on the challenges of managing large volumes of e-mail.

Why pick BlackBerry?

One of the major changes I am putting in place in early 2008 is a move to the BlackBerry solution for mobile e-mail. Previously, Brodies had adopted SPV Smartphones running Windows Mobile 5.0, at a time when there were compelling financial reasons to do so, and apparently few reasons not to. On paper the two solutions offer similar functionality, but BlackBerry is the more expensive option –requiring licences for both server and client – and in terms of support it is more complex. BlackBerry requires the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which not only adds extra administration and maintenance, but adds to the disaster recovery requirements.

As Windows Mobile runs from Microsoft Exchange, as long as you have a disaster recovery plan to keep Exchange running, your mobile devices can send and receive e-mail; whereas you need to have a separate disaster recovery plan in place for the BES. So far, so good. However, in practice, there was a high level of dissatisfaction with the handsets, primarily concerning poor battery life, crashing/freezing, problems synching e-mail, and the cumbersome Windows interface. Due to the way third parties take Windows Mobile and modify it to suit their handsets/ services, bugs and glitches are common and difficult to pin down to either the operating system or device.

While the BES represents an overhead, there are advantages, such as that it strips down and compresses e-mails and attachments as they arrive and so it sends less data and the data is also encrypted. Windows Mobile devices constantly send data packets to Exchange to see if there are new messages, so it is not a true ‘push’ technology, and this also explains the poor battery life of the handsets.

Due to its popularity, market saturation has meant that the costs associated with BlackBerry have dropped in recent years, which has made it a more affordable solution. A common argument in favour of Windows Mobile is that it is a solid platform to run applications on, but for lawyers, aside from Office Mobile, there are not too many useful applications targeted at the legal market that run on it – in fact many of the more exciting applications for law firms have been developed to run on BlackBerry, as it has such a large market share.

On a personal level, I approached this with an open mind, but having used Symbian-based smartphones, BlackBerry and now Windows Mobile smartphones in recent years, while the other solutions work reasonably well, BlackBerry is a clear leader in terms of speed, functionality and reliability. When lawyers are on the move, wasted seconds do actually matter, and BlackBerry is intuitive, fast and reliable – it was designed for mobile e-mail and it does it very well. While models running the newer version of Windows Mobile have improved, and will no doubt improve further in versions 7.0 and 8.0 in the future, to me it is not yet a true competitor to the BlackBerry. If in two years time Microsoft releases a BlackBerry-killer, then I’ll be happy to look at it again, but from the early rumours on the subject, it seems Microsoft may be more interested in releasing an iPhone-killer, so it will be interesting to see how this market develops.

Right on time

Once the BlackBerry handsets are rolled out, we will also shortly be installing mobile time recording on the devices, which is a very interesting development that will help to capture a lot of time that does not otherwise get recorded. Not only can lawyers enter and submit a timesheet from the device, it will also be configured so that whenever they make or receive a call, a prompt will ask if they would like to record the time. They can choose to never record time for that particular number, to record it to a particular client and matter just once, or for all calls to or from that number to always be recorded to the client and matter. It is a simple way to ease the burden of the travelling lawyer who needs to record their time but doesn’t have the time to do it!

Managing e-mail overload

Something many firms are suffering with as a consequence of the ease of electronic communication is e-mail overload, and Brodies is no exception. As lawyers have become more and more technically savvy, and as technology becomes part of the furniture of a law office, there have been great benefits – lawyers are more self-sufficient – but also disadvantages (lawyers have too much administration to do). While we can’t reduce the amount of e-mails, we can try to make them easier to manage. Many lawyers would not trust someone else to file their e-mails correctly, but simply do not have the time to do it themselves. Filing everything in a single electronic matter file is the holy grail and we are getting closer to it, but, until recently, lawyers could quite rightly complain that even though they could now save e-mails into the matter file, it was more timeconsuming than filing in their inbox or printing a hard copy to be filed.

With the inclusion of ‘Send & File’ functionality in the latest version of Interwoven’s WorkSite document management system, it looks like we may finally have a solution that will address this problem. Trials of the system have gone very well, and whenever I’ve shown it to lawyers in the firm, the response is usually, ‘When can I have it?’ and, ‘Why haven’t we had this before?’ Having upgraded the back-end to enable the new functionality, in early 2008 we will be updating all our desktops to take best advantage of it. Key to this change for the users will be that it will be accompanied by guidelines and policies regarding the filing of e-mail, and one-to-one desk-side training for every lawyer.

The ability to file e-mails quickly and easily into the matter in DM as they are sent and then have the replies automatically filed takes away the final excuse for users not to file to DM – it takes too long, and it’s quicker to hit ‘print’. So getting e-mail filing right is not just helping towards having the complete electronic matter file, it will also cut down on the resources and space required to file hard copy print-outs. All this ties into the ideal of the ‘less paper’ – as opposed to ‘paperless’ – office, which is another key focus for Brodies for 2008. We already have electronic faxing, matter-centric electronic filing, and electronic archiving of matters, so finding a solution to the paper that comes in the door is the next challenge. With an improved search engine in the next version of WorkSite, having all of our electronic files in the DM system is even more important to get the most from it.

Rising to new challenges

While the key projects mentioned above will be keeping me busy in the short-term, there is plenty more on the to-do list for the coming year, such as an upcoming practice management system upgrade, an intranet refurbishment/replacement, a KM project (looking at amongst other things enterprise search and implementing social software such as blogs and wikis, currently in pilot), enhancements to our VOIP phones, a business process management project addressing new client and matter intake, implementing new disaster recovery plans and much more. So no shortage of work to do going forward. Coming back to where I began, the move to Brodies has been a great opportunity because I have been fortunate enough to inherit a stable environment that acts as an excellent foundation to build upon, a dedicated and hard-working team to make projects such as these successful, and a firm that is driving forward and embraces change. IT has the potential to really improve our lawyers’ lives – just as it can make their life a misery if poorly implemented – so the challenge is to make sure that we’re always making a difference in the right way: by reducing administration, making information available more quickly or in a more digestible format, making processes more efficient, and so on.

While ‘keeping the lights on’ is a core part of what we do in IT – having a stable network, machines that don’t crash, printers that print, and so on – our staff need to know that we are also there to work with them to provide technical solutions to their problems wherever we can. People often follow ways of working because that’s how it has always been done, and they soon get used to annoying or time-consuming processes and assume there is no other way, or are too busy to stop and think about it. But ask them how things are going with regard to IT and they will say, ‘Fine’. So rather than go to lawyers and secretaries and ask them what their IT problems are, we need to identify the main challenges of each business area, and look at ways that IT can help to address them. This will be a key focus for me at Brodies in the coming years, and is an area where I think we can make a noticeable difference for our users.

The past six months have flown by and I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at Brodies. I will admit that I was not sure what to expect making the move north, but I have been very pleasantly surprised by the warmth of the welcome and the quality of the people and work I have encountered. As the new year begins, I am settling in nicely to my new life in Scotland, and looking forward to getting on with a very full programme of work with my team. I still haven’t quite got used to the cold, but as Billy Connolly said, ‘In Scotland there’s no such thing as bad weather; only the wrong clothes.’

Damien Behan is the IT director at Brodies LLP.